Search form

In June 2013, The Guardian published a classified document leaked by former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden detailing how the NSA is vacuuming up call data from the Verizon phone network under the auspices of Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Within days, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to defend Americans' rights to privacy, due process, and free speech.

EFF is separately litigating multiple cases over NSA spying, but EFF has also filed amici briefs to support the ACLU's lawsuit. At the district court level, EFF represented Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, one of the original authors of the Patriot Act, who told the court that the NSA's mass telephone records collection program was not what Congress intended when it passed the legislation. At the appellate level, EFF represented 17 computer scientists and professors, who explained that telephone call metadata can reveal behavioral patterns of innocent Americans, including their political and religious affiliations.

On May 7, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in favor of the ACLU, finding that "the telephone metadata program exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized and therefore violates [Section 215]." On October 29, 2015, the Second Circuit remanded the case back to district court.

Related Content

Earlier this month, the New York Times published a major story reporting that the NSA has stopped using the authority to run its massive, ongoing surveillance of Americans’ telephone records. After years of fighting mass surveillance of telephone records, the story may make our jobs easier: NSA has consistently...

Mark Rumold, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told ABC News he doesn't have much of a problem with the NSA's wider access to telephone data, since now the agency has to go through a "legitimate" system with "procedural protections" before jumping into the databases. "Their ability...

It’s been a rough few weeks for legal challenges to NSA surveillance. First, a federal district court in Maryland dismissed a lawsuit brought by the ACLU challenging the NSA’s Upstream surveillance of the Internet backbone. Then, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to grant the ACLU a...

Digital liberties groups across the country have both celebrated and criticized the recent passage of the USA Freedom Act. Here at EFF, we did a little bit of both. While USA Freedom will undoubtedly impact the court cases challenging the NSA’s mass surveillance, the full scope...

We now have the first decision from a court of appeals on the NSA’s mass surveillance program involving bulk collection of telephone records under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and it’s a doozy. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued anopinion in...

San Francisco - A federal appeals court today ruled that the NSA's bulk collection of phone records is illegal, saying Congress didn't authorize collection of a ''staggering'' amount of information on Americans. The decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S.Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit overturns...